Debian-Installer

Installing from d-i is currently untested and most likely not working because it uses debootstrap, which can only install from unstable without taking the Debian-Ports "unreleased" suite into account. A workaround is being worked on.

Kernels

We don’t offer later kernels because they require a Debian-generated initrd.

Debootstrap

It is currently not possible to simply debootstrap because we require both the “unstable” and “unreleased” suite. A combined repository of both (only the most important gigabyte of packages) is however available, and you can debootstrap from that as follows:

get 0x405422DD from hkp://pgp.uni-mainz.de and 0xE99007E0 from the Debian Developers keyring; validate the former with the latter and apt-key add it

add 「deb http://www.freewrt.org/~tg/dp cross main」 and run apt-get update (or “sid main”, but since we only pull one package from it anyway, it doesn’t matter)

install wtf-debian-keyring (which is just the same key as above)

run debootstrap with several additional options:

--include must be passed and the packages debian-ports-archive-keyring and wtf-debian-keyring listed

--keyring=/usr/share/keyrings/wtf-debian-keyring.gpg

use one of the following mirrors:

http://frozenfish.freewrt.org/~tg/dp

http://www.freewrt.org/~tg/dp (also SSL)

use “sid” as suite

after debootstrapping, chroot into it and 「dpkg --purge wtf-debian-keyring」 (unless you decide on keeping it)

pick your favourite Debian-Ports mirror (we’ll be using 「http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian-ports」) and create an /etc/apt/sources.list inside the chroot with, at the very least, the following two lines:

deb http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian-ports unstable main

deb http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian-ports unreleased main

Now you can run dselect update, apt-get --purge dist-upgrade, etc. (with eatmydata if you wish)

You may also purge wtf-debian-keyring and the repository from the “host” if you wish ☺

Multistrap

It should be possible to use that and pull directly from official Debian-Ports repositories, from an installed system that’s more up-to-date than etch-m68k. (The only “upgrade” path from etch-m68k we support is un-tarring one of the tarballs above and booting into them.) There’s no multistrap configuration as of yet, but if you know how to write one already, use the following two APT repositories combined into one:

Booting and installing Debian/m68k on an Amiga

To boot Debian on Amiga systems, a utility called amiboot is required. There are two commonly used versions of amiboot available, 5.6 and 6.0snapshot. Version 5.6 was shipped up to including Debian Sarge, while Etch and newer releases use 6.0snapshot. However, amiboot 6.0snapshot has some issues (see http://lists.debian.org/debian-68k/2013/04/msg00037.html for example) and it is therefore sometimes advisable to resort to amiboot 5.6 which usually works fine in these cases but requires the kernels to be decompressed prior use. This can be achieved using the UnARC utility part of AmigaOS 3.9 or similar utility from AmiNet.

This enables debugging through serial console, loads the kernel from vmlinuz-3.2.0-4-amiga and the compressed initrd from initrd.gz (both located in the same directory as amiboot in this case) and tells the kernel to set the video output standard to "pal" (use "ntsc" if you're in the US or any other countries which uses NTSC). Omitting the "video=" setting may result in the Amiga video showing a blank screen after booting the Linux kernel.

It can be helpful to redirect the console output to the serial console of the Amiga by adding "console=ttyS0,9600n8" (Note: Use "debug=ser" instead on Kernel 3.10-2-m68k as the kernel may crash otherwise, but it works fine now on more recent kernels like 3.14-1-m68k) to the kernel command line for the first boot attempts if you should have issues with the video output. If everything goes right, the machine should boot into Linux without problems.

It's highly recommended to copy all installer files onto an AmigaOS partition, then running amiboot to boot into Linux. This allows to conveniently edit the command line for amiboot in a Amiga shell script which can later be used to boot into Linux by double-clicking its icon. Editing the amiboot; command line can be necessary when changing the version of amiboot used, enabling serial console or extra debugging (see above). Copying all installer files onto hard disk also helps avoiding problems with SCSI controllers unsupported by Linux which attach the CD-ROM drive used to the Amiga. The very popular Squirrel SCSI PCMCIA adaptor is unsupported on Linux, for example. Accessing installer files on a hard disk will always work (provided that the disk is connected to the internal IDE controller, in case of Amiga 600/1200).

There are several Amiga shell scripts available to boot into Linux for installation, depending on the video card used:

StartInstall - Amiga chipset graphics

StartInstall_CV3D - Cybervision 3D graphics

StartInstall_CV64 - Cybervision 64 graphics

StartInstall_clgen - Cirrus Logic graphics

StartInstall_retz3 - Retina Z3 graphics

Installation notes for the various graphics cards are supplied in the Amiga installation directory. StartInstall; should work for most users. If no video output can be seen after booting Linux, it may help to use serial console (see above).

After successfully booting into Linux, Debian Installer will start and try to detect the available disks and hardware. In order to do a network installation, a supported network card is required (see http://www.g-mb.de/pcmcia_e.html for an incomplete list of PCMCIA network cards supported on the Amiga 600/1200, for example; not all PCMCIA network adapters supported by the Linux kernel actually work on Amiga hardware due to a different PCMCIA driver layer used for the Amiga).

Hardware limitations on Atari

4 MiB ST-RAM are not enough. (Although that was for 3.2; we should recheck this with the modularised 3.10 which is much smaller, when loading the initrd into TT-RAM.)

The EtherNAT and EtherNEC patches are not yet in the mainline kernel, and thus also not in the Debian kernel. You can hand-compile your own m68k-queue kernel if you dare and need support for that hardware.

The x.org fbdev driver does not seem to support any of the Atari video modes (yet; an experimental patch is said to have been written).

Read also this mailing list thread as it contains important additional information. Remember to use the ‘p’ tar(1) option when extracting the tarballs, i.e. “tar xzpf file.tgz” or similar.

Instructions for installing old Debian releases 2.0, 2.1 and 2.2 on Macs can be found at M68k/Archive. These are mostly kept for posterity; if for some reason an old Linux 2.2 kernel was desired, it would be better to install Debian release 3.1.